olav

It currently is built on php/mysql with laravel with a web ui in bootstrap. This has become super annoying for a few years now because once a year or so I have to port it to a new version of laravel and cope with the new javascript framework du jour that it now promotes.

This would be fine, of course, if you run an agency which extracts money from clients for continuous upgrades, but not for a personal project.

Fossil, on the other hand, is built for longevity. It is a single executable and comes with all tools built in.

We loose so many things all the time, the ability to make stuff, the ability to repair things, even the use of drills and hammers quickly fades away for the TikTok generation.

I love the notion of the OP and applaud initiatives like the various Smalltalks or https://gpblocks.org/ that try to keep the awe in our craft alive.

Terrible audio focus on a single speaker, it really forces you to speak like on these old CB radios where you had to say "over" every time you were done talking.

The single window UI follows the mobile-first trend but is awfully inefficient on my three monitor setup, even more so with screen sharing.

Plus, our admins lock the whole MS Office 365 down so that there are no APIs or third-party plugins allowed. Data in it is just trapped.

Such a waste of human potential.

An alternative arrangement of functions are property palettes like they are used in CAD tools, Adobe Photoshop, Open Office, or Apple Pages. There, functions are not globally aranged in ribbons like "Start", "References", but are presented in the context of a selected object.

For example, if I have selected an image, the topmost palette shows properties applicable to an image. In addition, I get tabs with options for the placement of the image in a text frame, and for the page the text frame is located on. Very neat, not at all arbitrary, but reflecting the hierarchy of the objects I am working with.